Delphi, Mobileye team up for Level 4 self-driving tech

Delphi Automotive and Mobileye are collaborating on technologies that should enable cars to operate at full autonomy by late 2019 or early 2020. This is one of the automated Audi SQ5's that Delphi is using to a new "first mile" and "last mile" system to augment the public transit system of Singapore.(Photo: Sid Quah, Sid Quah for Delphi)

Delphi Automotive and Mobileye, two leading suppliers of autonomous vehicle technology, will collaborate on a broader system that should enable vehicles to achieve full, or Level 4, autonomy by 2019.

Mobileye is the Israeli-based developer of computer vision systems, mapping and machine learning algorithms. Delphi, with a large technical center in Troy, has already created a system of driving software, sensors and radar that has guided a fleet of Audi SQ5's on several cross-country autonomous trips.

A key part of what Delphi brings to the partnership are software algorithms that help navigate a vehicle, a technology it acquired in August 2015 when it bought Ottomatika, a startup created at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.

The two companies declined to specify the amount of their combined investment, but Kevin Clark, Delphi CEO, said it would be in the "hundreds of millions of dollars." They plan to demonstrate their new system in urban and highway driving next January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They will begin testing a fleet of vehicles in Las Vegas shortly after that event.

The two companies have worked together since 2002.

"This partnership will allow us to give our customers an increased level of automated capabilities faster and more cost effectively," Clark said.

Earlier this month, Delphi and the Singapore transport authority announced that the supplier would develop a small test fleet of fully autonomous vehicles for an on-demand service supplementing the city-state's existing public transit system. That project is expected to provide commuters with a "first mile" and "last mile" option between a mass-transit station and their home or workplace by 2019.

In July, Mobileye announced a partnership with BMW and Intel to build and commercialize self-driving cars by 2021.

"This partnership is between suppliers. These two agreements are complementary," said Amnon Shashua, Mobileye chairman and chief technical officer. "So whatever we do with Delphi would definitely help any other alliance we have with carmakers."

Last month, Mobileye announced it was ending its relationship with Tesla Motors. Mobileye supplied a "vision-on-a-chip" system used in Tesla's Model S sedan and Model X crossover. The system enables the Tesla vehicles to detect other vehicles and whether traffic is clear to allow lane changes.

"We’re no longer going to support Tesla," Shashua said. "This is something we announced and we are not changing our mind."

Asked how soon the system Delphi and Mobileye intend to develop would be available on a market-ready vehicle, Delphi's Clark said, "Depending on how early an automaker would begin to work with us, it could be on a vehicle as early as late 2019 or early 2020."

While some automakers seeking to create a Level 4 autonomous vehicle, notably Google and more recently Ford, have said they don't plan to include steering wheels or pedals in those vehicles, Clark said Delphi and Mobileye envision that vehicles with their jointly-developed system would have manual controls.